Efficient speaker: Zu, Tekton, Volti, Klipsch, Fleetwood?


We’re moving and I’m looking for a high-efficiency, high impedance speaker that can fill a very large “great room” with smooth, open, detailed sound, both for serious listening and casual background music. I currently have Devore Super 9s, but those will be going in a separate dedicated listening room. I thought about getting another pair of Devores (maybe the O/93) for the great room because I love this brand, but I’m interested in other possibilities The new speakers will be on either side of a 6-foot TV console, so they’ll need to sound good fairly close to the wall behind them. And they will need to have a reasonably good WAF. They will be played mainly at low-moderate sound levels and our tastes include rock, classical, world music and “spa” type relaxation stuff.

Anyone who is familiar with any of the following candidates, please feel free to sound off. As you can see, price ranges are all over the place:

Zu Soul Supreme

Tekton Lore

Volti Razz

Klipsch Forte IV

Fleetwood Deville

Others?

128x128ladok

The O96s that @tubebuffer mentioned sold in one day despite prior delivery by Bender at Planet Express.

They were located right around the corner from me, and I've got to admit I was tempted as I ponder my chances of moving to a space too small to keep the beloved Soundlabs. First world problems! Cheers,

Spencer

@Ladok 

Thank You for taking the time to describe your room dimensions, seating position, ect.  That info is very helpful. One thing I noticed, that has me concerned, is the lack of space between binding post on the Super 9's. The positive and negative post appear to be very close to one another.  Do you or have you used spade terminations?

I have Cardas Clear Lite S/wires.  The spade OD are 1/2" wide X 1/4" ID. Do you think they would fit ok?  If I have done the math correctly; I would need 3/8 of an inch gap between the post.  That would leave about 1/8 of an ich gap between the two spades when connected to the terminal post.

Thanks again

Brad  

I use bananas, although I do recall using spades when I first got them and didn't notice and problems. I have the speakers boxed up right now as we are preparing to move, so I can't measure the space.

Again, Thanks for your help

Tone Audio in SFO should be able to provide the dimension.  Im  thinking about calling them in the AM

 

Thanks

PS: Good luck with the move

Brad

 

 

 

Ladok,

The Zu Griewe gap is not difficult to adjust if you follow published directions and start at the reference 1/8" gap. Then you can go through a one-time exercise to get it right for your room and you're done. Devore and Zu are different experiences. Every Devore speaker I've heard has discontinuities between driver behaviors, but they become far easier to discern after hearing the coherence and unity behaviors of Zu. If you like the somewhat "rich," euphonic bass of Devore combined with a crossover constriction in the heart of midrange with a tweeter that is faster than the slow midrange driver, then shy away from the top-to-bottom consistency and coherence of crossoverless Zu. Steve Guttenberg flubbed his Soul 6 review. He did it too hastily, didn't work the Griewe Gap properly and got them (Zu's fault) with insufficient burn-in. He should have blasted them for 2-3 more weeks before doing the review. For more current perspectives on well-burned-in pairs, see John Darko's youtube review, and Srajan Ebean's 6Moons recent review. Both took more care in setup than Guttenberg did.

Soul Supreme is a room-friendly, amp-friendly speaker. The Radian 850 supertweeter is silky and the 16 ohms load makes most solid state amps sound cleaner and more musical than lower impedance speakers on same amps. If you use a tube amp without 16 ohm outputs or a SS amp of low power, you can use 25ohm parallel resistors at the speaker inputs to get a net load of ~8ohms.

Soul 6 is vivid, dispersive, room-filling, bass-impressing, despite its smaller size. The main driver and concentric supertweeter have a larger cone of dispersion, and the driver is energetically quick and percussive. The okoume cabinet with underlying superstructure is a champ at energy management and lightweight to boot. Soul 6 is easily the most coherent, unity-behaviors speaker in its price class, but this industry has trained customers to like a lot of low-unity speaker designs, so depending on your frame of reference, you might have to give a Soul 6 or even a Soul Supreme some time for you own mind to acclimate to holistic, phase-coherent sound, or you might love it right off the bat. Or you might not get there and reject it. That's why Zu gives you 2 months to find out. Soul 6 is easy to lift, pack up and return. You can do it all by yourself.

If you happen to be in Los Angeles, you can hear them on my systems.

Phil